Ballad of a Certified Homewrecker
by KissTheBoy7
Summary: The tale of how Anatoly fathered each of his many children, most of whom he doesn't even know about. Spawnverse conception drabbles for Elizabeth. Mature themes, Anatoly/many OCs and also Florence, implied Anatoly/Freddie at the end.


**Jade**

Anatoly has always wanted to travel.

It is his first match abroad, and he expects to feel excitement, anticipation; instead, the dread that has been floating loose and uncomfortable in his gut solidifies as the plane touches down in Madrid. He hunches with a grimace and ignores the looks he receives in return.

There are at least a dozen agents with him. He reasons that that must be why he's feeling this way.

(It is a feeling that he will grow used to, this horrid combination of denial and dread.)

It isn't as though he really has anything to complain about, and he feels even worse thinking about it; he's twenty three and married, boasted about. The government was paying for this vacation of his – not only the chess, but the hotel, everything. He could have everything, as far as they were concerned – as long as he won.

Svetlana was at home, worrying. Arik was not. He wasn't sure which of them was making him queasier.

(Probably both.)

The hotel is upscale if anything; he's treated with a warm welcome, with smiles (he has yet to discover that most of them are empty) and drinks, which he politely declines. The women smile at him and bat their lashes, and he feels his gut tighten with yet more things that he doesn't want to think about.

He quickly concludes, as he slips off back to his hotel room, that there is nothing here for him in Spain.

The wedding ring on his finger itches – he's not used to wearing it, yet, has always hated jewelry. Anatoly is a simple man from a simple family; he had grown up sharing a small bed with his brother, a cramped room with both of them, eating ravenously whatever his father had brought home for them. Luxury was not something he was used to, nor that he particularly wanted. Luxury and love.

What to make of it all?

Svetlana is still as foreign to him as this ring – blonde and beautiful and shiny and new, so sure that she will love him and he will love her and he doesn't know how to tell her that he doesn't know how this works, or how anything works, really – and he slips it off with a little guilt, safely into his pocket. He will put it back on in the morning, before the match and the flash of the cameras. For now – well, she will never know.

It gathers and tightens and by the second day (he won the match, he always wins the match) he could be sick with it. His ring remains forgotten on his nightstand.

And then there is a woman in the hall, that night, when he is coming back to his room – partly to escape his keepers, partly because he can't take it anymore, partly just because – and there is a woman, and she doesn't look like Svetlana at all.

Her smile is not hopeful. Her smile is simply there, sunny like her sun-kissed skin, dark hair curled around her face, hand extended. "You must be the chess player. I forget your name."

He tells her that he's a tourist and they trip back to his room, and they talk for hours afterwards. Anatoly thinks for almost an entire moment, as his eyes close of their own accord, that perhaps this was good practice – that perhaps Svetlana is right, and he is capable, and he can touch her now without fear that he will be something that she is not expecting.

The woman's name is beautiful like her hair and like her body stretched out naked beneath his, and in the morning he doesn't even have time to speak it before she is pressing the wedding ring from the nightstand into his hand.

She leaves, and he thinks that he is more devastated. 

**Dominika**

The second time he is twenty four and not so naïve as he was the year before.

Svetlana looks the same to him, stranger every day in fact. He has not lost a match. She has not stopped trying to smile since their wedding night.

(One day she will, and he will miss it.)

He is touring the country, again, and he is up-and-coming, and he has still not slept with his wife, and Arik has disappeared from Moscow and his life and he wins, he wins every match. Molokov slaps him on the shoulder and calls him comrade, beaming.

Anatoly cannot remember the last time he had called someone his friend; and yet, he had so many.

Young men come with shining eyes for his autograph, and he tries to perfect his signature, because one day he's sure it will be worth something. He still has hope, still thinks that he might come home and find that everything has righted itself in his head, because that is where the problems lie.

He hasn't slept at home in a month. Russia is a large country, Russia is strong, Russia will protect him – will love him – and he loves Russia, but finds that he does not love all parts of it equally.

It is particularly cold, further north. He drinks his coffee black. The inn that he is staying at smells nothing like home, and no one says anything about the way the girl at the desk looks at him with big eyes, or the fact that he looks back, once, and the next day looks away from her as he straightens his tie as though nothing has happened. 

**Karina**

Homesickness rages through him again the moment he crosses the border; it makes no sense, as however Svetlana tries she has been unable to make anything resembling a _home_ for him. But here he is.

The first night there he goes to eat in a small restaurant on a corner, and he watches furtively as a blonde woman with the same almost-happiness as his wife dines alone several booths away, reading something that looks like Sylvia Plath.

Czech food is similar but not similar enough to Russian food. He pushes his pasta around in cooling puddles of sauce for half an hour before she notices his staring.

He looks down immediately, ashamed, but she is walking over to him and he must brace himself for the sting of her slap.

Instead she lifts his chin and looks into his eyes, and smiles gently as she asks him where he is from.

He lies and tells her that he is from the next town over. It's an easier lie than his wedding ring, which he slips into his pocket. Whether she notices the movement or not, he will never know.

(The chess here is no better than the food. He hopes the sex is worth his time.)

She leads him by the hand to her room, over a tavern just two blocks away. He forgets to tip the waitress, but that's alright. She hadn't been very attentive, anyways.

He tells himself that she is beautiful, and then tells her as well. She preens beneath his gaze, bare and sashaying her hips. She smiles like a lonely person – like him – like that is the last happy thing in her life.

She touches him like a lonely person, too. He is becoming familiar with the motions and he goes through them just the same way. She doesn't call him mechanical, but somehow, he knows that he is. He doesn't know the words to apologize.

In the morning he tells her that he has somewhere to be, and though she doesn't believe him, she lets him go.

He waits until the door has closed to search in his pocket for the ring that he doesn't even want on his finger. 

**Joshua**

It's just competition after competition lately. Anatoly is secretly grateful not to be at home. If he had been homesick months ago, now he is the opposite – there is a word for this, wanderlust, which he wryly agrees with.

Lust is something that he knows how to deal with.

(Arik might not agree; Arik is conspicuously absent, still. Always.)

Svetlana, however, is not. He calls her from his hotel room, a little later each night, until they've grown used to not speaking for days at a time. His escorts are silent on the matter when he is within hearing distance, but he knows they talk.

They are a young couple, and they should still be in the sickening stages of young love, tender and wild at once.

Anatoly is certainly wild; Svetlana is cooped up in the apartment, in Moscow. She could have come. She hadn't opted to.

(He hadn't given her the option, exactly.)

He doesn't like a lonely bed, and luckily, he rarely has one. He is still attractive enough – and, well, successful enough, although he hates having to wear these formal clothes while he is on his vacations, his endless vacation (nothing but chess amateurs and foreign women, there could be nothing better) – that he hardly has to go fishing.

Molokov leads him around Europe like a show pony and he loses himself in the rhythm of it, drunk and laughing in a bar in Italy with some woman who says that she loves his accent. He almost lets her kiss him there – he almost doesn't remember why he shouldn't.

She twirls her fingers in his hair. She whispers to him as she tugs his tie and leads him to his own bed that he's beautiful, that he'll make a great daddy someday. He isn't sure whether or not she's trying to be kinky, or if she really means it, but it puts a pit in his stomach and it takes him a moment to muster an erection this time.

Still, she's pretty enough, and Molokov knows enough to keep the press away until he sees her leave. Anatoly is young; he's not about to refuse a good lay, not tipsy and already groaning as she straddles his hips and rolls hers down against him, teasing.

"You must have such nice genes," she murmurs, searching his eyes. He feels a bit like livestock being bred, but he also feels dizzy. He goes along with it.

She is American and it is fascinating how smooth and small she is in comparison to the women he's had before. She calls herself Hazel, but her eyes are green. He gets the feeling she's lying, anyways.

The more the merrier. 

**Zoe**

He misses a call, presumably from Moscow, on his fourth night in Berlin.

It has been a long four days, and he is exhausted – chess is exhausting, now, nothing like the sport it used to be. He wants to believe that it will get better, but his naïveté is wearing very thin these days, and optimism is no longer an option.

But just for a moment, it flares to life again.

The number is a familiar one – his parent's apartment, his childhood home. He mouths them one by one, his hands beginning to tremble, and Molokov doesn't even have the time to reach out and pat his back like he normally would before he is racing for a payphone.

Arik's familiar scent is filling his mouth. He has not seen his twin in years.

(It probably wasn't Arik.)

(He's willing to pretend, though, for now.)

Germany is a little like Russia in that drinking is a great sport here, even for children as young as they had been the first time they had knelt on his narrow bed together and pressed their lips together, shy and slow, as though they had all the time in the world. There is a group of teenagers in the lobby, elbowing one another, obviously drunk. He has to navigate around them to reach the payphone.

It wasn't Arik, and he knows it, but it still fills his stomach with lead to think that he had really believed it for a moment.

His mother asks him how he is doing, when she can expect a grandchild. He spends the next five minutes being rid of her.

The girl looks hardly eighteen, but she has overheard his conversation and she is limber and willing. She meets his eyes and drinks in his sadness, the emotional agony, and with the hopefulness of a child catches his arm.

They talk for a long time afterwards, about everything of no significance. Her name is a passing fancy; he is interested in her life, in her siblings, in her schooling. He feels like an old man, though he is not even ten years older than her.

She traces patterns into his skin, and though she is young, and has a boyfriend (possibly several) back in her hometown, she seems to understand him in those fleeting moments.

He is sad to see her go, which is bizarre.

She reminds him of the first. The thought makes him sick enough that he has to wash his mouth out with vodka.

He doesn't remember the matches in Berlin, only that he won. 

**Renata**

There is no way to pretend that it's the first time he's done this. He takes solace in the fact that it's the first time that Molokov hasn't paid, however.

Maybe it will even be the last time.

(He's not that lucky.)

The oddest part is that he's _home, _or, well, as home as he ever gets. He is in Russia – in Moscow, even, just a few streets away from his apartment. Svetlana is waiting for him at home. She'll be wondering where he is, soon, if he's not quick about it…

He doesn't want it quick and easy, though. He wants it to hurt.

Anything. He'll do anything to feel something other than _guilt, _than _monotony, _than _absolutely nothing._

She has long nails and long hair, dark and thick and exactly the opposite of everything Svetlana is. He thinks that perhaps if he does this enough then he might even start to love her, as some twisted reaction to his own guilt.

Yeah, Something like that.

They don't speak, not any more than they have to. Oddly, he misses the intimacy. The other women he's slept with – the women and _Arik_, of course, who is still frozen in time, silent and forever faraway (he imagines him, just for an instant, lying bent at awkward angles in someone's bathtub and shakes the image from his mind just as quickly) – the other women he's slept with, they've all been so talkative, all wanting to know about his life, his pathetic life.

This one asks him his name, which he understands is a courtesy, and tells him hers (Bianca) and then kisses from his lips down to his cock, and that is that.

He pays her well, better than she had probably expected, even knowing who he is.

She smiles prettily, tells him to buy his wife a bouquet tomorrow.

He might just do that. He might.

He kind of wants to.

But that would require a conversation, and though he'd love to find the secret to _enjoying_ making Svetlana's eyes light up, he doesn't think he's going to find it in the center of a rose. 

**Preston**

For the first time since Molokov had it beaten into him that he must win, that he had no other option, Anatoly finds himself on the losing end of a game of chess.

It's for fun, really. He is playing with his second – his replacement second, since Molokov is far from a challenge and they both know why he's really here – and he starts thinking about Svetlana, about the way she'd said goodbye to him just yesterday.

"Checkmate."

It's startling. It's unwelcome.

He grits his teeth.

He discovers that not only is he not _allowed_ to lose, he also doesn't _like_ it.

"I am going out," he says abruptly, and knows without saying a word that the man across the board from him will never breathe a word of this to anybody. Unstable, they've been whispering, the pressure has finally cracked him –

Maybe they're right, but he still smiles politely and shakes the hands of everyone he's supposed to. He still wins the match. He still plays behind the red flag.

They keep him solely because he is a good showman, a good player.

He wants to be so much _more _than that, and more than them. He just doesn't know what. Or how.

In anger, in helpless, pathetic anger, he finds a bar and orders a round for himself. The vodka here is not Russian, and frankly, it tastes like shit. There is no one around for him to complain to; he doesn't want to talk, anyways, except to ask sullenly for refills as he dashes a random sum of money across the counter.

The bartender is especially gracious. She questions him quite a bit and receives little in the way of answer; and when the time comes to close up for the night, she coaxes him behind the counter and into the back room and they do it like animals, and Anatoly feels immensely better afterwards – about some things, at least.

He is a winner, but he needs something to keep his head in the game.

He's beginning to think this might be some kind of addiction.

Still. He wins the match. And the next.

As long as he keeps being the winner they want him to be for them, he can do whatever the hell he wants – consequence free. 

**Christine**

It's been exactly a month since he's seen his wife.

Everything is happening excruciatingly slowly now. Every move he makes, on and off the board. He knows he is in Belarus, not that he's entirely certain he could place it on a map. It is a quaint town and they are ecstatic to have him. He can't imagine why.

Even Svetlana can't possibly be happy to have him anymore.

He certainly isn't happy to have himself.

The air tastes wrong, and so does the water. Nothing tastes like home; he isn't really certain he has a home, or that he ever had. He was not a child anymore. He was twenty-six, and the only consistency in his life is the eyes watching over his shoulder everywhere he goes, charting his progress and keeping him in line.

In his month away from home, he hadn't bothered screwing around. That in itself is shocking.

He is not staying here long. The next tournament is weeks away, and he will be returning home as soon as he is done here. A joyous homecoming, surely.

He almost hopes he loses a match or two, if only to extend his vacation.

(But he can't break his winning streak.)

Molokov claps him on the shoulder slyly, as though he can't sense the way it festers like an infection behind his eyes, when he excuses himself for a breath of the night air. He only sighs in return.

After all of this time, he knows Molokov's gestures better than his own wife's.

The nights here are thick with cold; the women wear headscarves and the men large leather belts, like symbols of their masculinity. Anatoly privately thinks that they are unnecessary – then again, no one would have called him the epitome of masculinity.

She is smoking a cigarette privately, edged into an alley a block away from the hotel. Her headscarf is vibrantly red, decorative rather than practical, and she must be cold but she seems perfectly at ease, watching the sidewalk in the gathering darkness as the streetlamps begin to flicker to life, bright and orange.

He means to walk past her. He's not in control of his life, but he's in control of this.

He doesn't fuck every woman with beautiful eyes.

But she flicks the ash from the end of her cigarette, and all of a sudden he's pressing her up against the wall, and her hands are in his hair and she is the wildest of all of them, thus far, wilder even than his heart which he's sure is going to give out at any moment.

She asks him how he wants it, half a moan, half a demand. He shakes his head, because any way is fine so long as she can make him forget.

She does. He uses her like he would a sock, and she lets him.

There is nothing moral about what he does. There is nothing glamorous. He wonders how celebrities in other countries do these things, so openly, so scandalously. How they talk about them in their magazines as though it is something desirable. It's not.

He feels the curls in her hair crunch in his fists and thinks of Arik's, which were so much softer. He wonders if his brother has grown his hair out yet.

There is a buzzing in his brain. His legs are leaden.

He heads back to the hotel and calls it an early night. He cannot be bothered to think anymore. 

**Natalia**

For whatever reason, he had expected Svetlana to be much colder when he finally conceded to touch her. Instead she's warm – warmer than any of the women he's had so far, warm with his own shame, with her endless hope.

He has never met anyone so hopeful.

She almost makes it feel as though there is still something left for them.

He wants so badly for there to be something, anything at all. He wants to give her everything that he had never been able to give anyone else. Because he was married. Because of chess.

Svetlana was his wife, and she should come first.

So he doesn't tell her that she is, by his count, twelfth in line, and when she curls her fingers around his biceps and whispers about babies, about homes and springtime and warmth, he nods his concession and suddenly they are in the bedroom.

He has nothing left to give, and so he is willing to give her everything.

Theirs was such a broken home to begin with. Anatoly isn't sure that he can ever mend it – he is a master of war games, not of reconstruction. He knows how to go about winning, but not in pairs. He has been solitary too long.

Svetlana straddles his hips and leans down to touch a quieting finger to his lips. She tells him that she has been reading, and if he will just listen carefully…

He doesn't know how to go about listening, either, unless it is to the cogs turning in his own head. But he tries, for her.

(He knows that it's really for his sake, but that is not something she has to know.)

Never does he pause to consider whether or not a baby is what he wants. Never had he ever really paused to consider whether he wanted a marriage at all, let alone a family. He cannot handle a wife, let alone an infant.

But there is a glow about her when she tells him, and he can't help but feel happy for a moment.

Perhaps this will be the answer to their problems, then. To _his_ problems.

(He knows that it isn't, but forfeiting is no longer an option.) 

**Jiaying**

Svetlana gives him the good news over the telephone on his second night in a lonely, cramped Chinese hotel room.

There is only so much that he can do to celebrate, here, as for once he doesn't know the native language – he'd studied everything but Mandarin, it seemed, while he was in school and it was far too late for him to learn. Still, he manages to find a tiny bottle of sparkling juice to pop the cork on and laugh with her until he cried, and continued to long after the line was dead and the sun disappeared from the horizon.

They're hardly even married. He doesn't suppose now is the time to have that conversation.

It's with the anguished hope building inside of him that he meets the wife of a local chessman and puts on the charm, anything to relieve the panic building in his chest – the man is, seemingly, aware and approving, but that doesn't make him feel better.

Afterwards he feels dirty, perverted.

(As though this is the first time.)

He wonders how many times he has slept with someone else's wife. He wonders, then, how many men have had Svetlana that way, while he is away and she is lonely and pining and so young, so ready for fire and passion and love even if it's fake.

He decides that he will bring her home a present in compensation, and the woman (her eyes are dark but they sparkle beautifully, and he wishes he weren't too guilty to appreciate them, appreciate her) takes him to the marketplace to help him pick.

It's some trinket, some small wooden box, hand painted. It is for jewelry or possibly coins. He doesn't know what she'll use it for; all he knows is that he had good intentions.

He arrives home safe and sound and smelling of everything but Oriental women with beautiful slanted eyes and straight dark hair between his fingers. She loves it, of course. She loves any scrap he is willing to throw her way, even well aware that it's pathetic.

She loves _him, _and she is trying to make it work.

If he could just love her _back_… 

**Jacqueline**

He's going to be a father.

What is this feeling? It reminds him of the tightness in his chest when he had found out that he was going to have another brother – before, of course, he'd grown up to be a fanatic. It reminds him of the singing in his veins when Arik had kissed him back, one morning, for the first time in years, and breathed against his lips, "Brother."

He's going to be a _father._

They're going to be a _family. _He hasn't had one in so long –

He isn't prepared. His fingers shake dangerously as they pluck his opponent's pieces from the board, mechanically one by one.

The first time he visits Paris, there is a woman in a bookstore who laughs and tells him, "A mother always knows." He thinks if he believed in love at first sight, he might have a case of it. She is worldly and wears wire-rimmed glasses, and throws her head back when she laughs. He wants to taste the pale of her throat the first time she does it; the second time, he does.

She was only supposed to be giving him advice – in fact, he hadn't even asked for advice. He'd asked for directions.

She gave it willingly, though, just like she gave him several gasping, sobbing orgasms with fingers placed exactly where he was sure he wouldn't want them, even after all of these years. At the end of it she smiled at him fondly, kissed his nose.

"You'll be ready when she comes," she tells him, rubbing his belly reassuringly. It takes him a long, winded moment to realize she means the baby, and by then she's already halfway dressed.

It still takes him off guard when he meets women more experienced than he is.

He doesn't know if he wants any more experience, though he might rethink that if all of them went like this.

For the rest of the day he hobbles around and imagines Arik, smoking and leaning on a post on every streetcorner. 

**Sasha**

There is one instance, one single, horrifying instance, in which Anatoly is entirely certain that he's become a homewrecker.

He doesn't like to remember it. Most of the time, he doesn't. But it's hard.

She lived one floor below them. She was demure, convenient.

It was her advance, so he shouldn't feel so badly about it, except he does. He has to listen to every argument, every angry word passed between them, for weeks afterwards, until finally the divorce papers are signed and he never saw her again.

They had been familiar to one another, he had been drunk. It was all a big misunderstanding.

(She never spoke his name in their arguments, not once, and he's disgustingly grateful, because Svetlana's ears were sharp and her hope was still so dazzling to witness. She was only a few months pregnant, barely showing, but already they'd redone the guest room, made it into a nursery.

Anatoly wonders if this baby will grow up to hate it's life as much as he did. He wonders if he'll hate the baby, when he finally gets to see it – when it's not just another part of Svetlana that he's afraid to touch, lest she feel the weakening of his conviction.

Divorce is just not an option for them.

He doesn't think he could live with the shame of it. He already carries so much of it around, a secret in his back pocket.

(The woman downstairs, she'd called him Tolya, and he misses bumping into her in the mornings when he's going to fetch his mail.)

The man downstairs, whose name he prefers not to think let alone speak, remains a silent, burly part of his daily routine. His eyes flit suspiciously to Anatoly every time they cross paths, despite his best efforts.

Word was that she'd returned home to her parents, in a small village in the far East. It was a shame, everyone agreed. She had seemed so faithful, such a good wife. That man, he wasn't kind to their children – he hadn't let their mother see them in months now.

Anatoly looks around, but there are no other apartments for rent. When the baby is born he finds another reason to stay inside, not that he wanted one.

He discovers that he hates children, but also that he loves this one.

The vicious cycle continues. 

**Heidi**

Australia is probably as far from Russia as he will ever manage to travel, and yet it still feels too close – claustrophobic.

He can feel their eyes watching him. Anatoly isn't paranoid, he's just… well. Realistic.

Molokov has been watching him his whole life. It only stands to reason that there are others, and that they will never leave him alone.

(He wonders what they think of him, if they are jealous or if they pity him. There's no way to ask them.)

He nearly throws the match in Sydney, dreaming that if he lost they might just leave him here, on this remote island where the waves crash over colorful coral and the people all smile, and none of them know his name.

Chess is not a sensation in the Pacific islands like it is in Europe, or even America. He could be nobody here.

He has grown so _tired _of being a person.

People, high-profile people like him, they don't know what privacy means. They don't even know their own children – their own spouses – they know nothing but the only thing they are good for, and even when countless women have taken some piece of him for their collection he still can't find it in him to be optimistic.

Real people have thoughts and feelings, relationships (real ones) with other real people. Real people have responsibilities. They have respect for themselves.

Anatoly doesn't think he's ever respected anybody less than this piece of human trash he has become.

Escape becomes his favorite daydream, though if he will admit it to himself it has _always _been a dream of his. Down south it is sunny, it is warm, and it is not _Russia._

The woman he meets in the airport, she wants to give him a free souvenir. She wants to take him home, she wants him to meet her son, who is so very inspired by him, apparently, whom she is planning on buying a nice chessboard of his very own for Christmas.

They end up in the airport bathroom, panting and sweating alongside a hundred other couples parting, putting hundreds and thousands of miles between their hearts.

He would love to go home with a woman like her. He would _love _to be anyone but the person he is right now – a father, a husband.

Molokov gives him a look that would have chilled him ten years ago. He doesn't even meet his eyes as he reclines in his seat, tie still crooked, hair still an unruly mess.

He wishes the plane had left without him, but he's just not that lucky. 

**Emilia**

His second child is conceived completely by accident, although he's certain that Svetlana is ecstatic about the whole ordeal.

(He can't imagine why. The first time was hell.)

Children are the last thing on his mind, though – Natalia, especially, is the last thing on his mind.

Their relationship is deteriorating rapidly and there is no other way, nothing else he knows how to do. So he spreads her thighs and fits himself between them, and tells her desperately, again and again that he loves her, and she nods and fists the sheets and maybe, possibly, (probably) she is thinking about children enough for the both of them.

The sex is fantastic, which in itself is strange. He doesn't see Svetlana as anything but familiar, a stranger whose house he lives in, who was always there to take the baby from his arms in the middle of the night with an irate noise and rock her to sleep, because he just couldn't seem to get a hang of the whole "parent" thing and he wasn't even sure how this had happened, wasn't even sure that he _wanted _to be a father –

Natalia is getting old enough to be alone for an hour or two and Svetlana, she wants to kiss him. First on the cheek, then the mouth…

The sex is so good that it's almost _frightening. _He thinks, just for a moment as they shared the air between them in deepening pants, that maybe he's made a mistake all these years, thinking that he was stuck in an unhappy marriage.

If it turned out that he _did _love her, after all, then the guilt was going to eat him alive. 

**Nick & Connor**

He hadn't been home in time for either of his children's births.

Duty called, and secretly (or perhaps not so much, from the tone of Svetlana's phone calls) he was glad for it. He had never been overly fond of the finer details of a woman's anatomy, nor did he want to further acquaint himself. Especially not like _that._

Blood and mess successfully avoided, he found himself travelling in higher spirits than he's been in in years to Dublin.

It has been a while since Molokov has clapped him on the shoulder, but he does it now, watching his eyes rove over the people clumped together on the sidewalks as they made their way to the hotel. He takes his bag, not without some resistance.

"Come now, comrade, you must _relax." _He pulled again, and Anatoly reluctantly let him take it, knowing already that he is doomed to repeat his past sins. It would be so much easier if he weren't being encouraged…

Nevertheless, he steels himself for a night of absolutely nothing, and hits the streets.

He's taken it upon himself to glean a treat for everyone in the family wherever he went, from now on. He had three girls at home to take care of now; his wife and his daughters, both too small to spell their own names. He couldn't help but smile at the mental image, a glow caught in his arteries.

Love is not what he expected it to be.

It's better.

The women here are not so tempting, or rather, none of them are actively trying to seduce him into their beds, and he is all too grateful. He can imagine the disappointment on his daughter's face if she ever caught wind of what kind of man her daddy was; Natalia was still small, still impressionable. He had to set an example.

As the shadows grow longer, the crowds seem to thin; some women, however, remain on the street – women with stringy hair and empty eyes, with no clotheslines to call their own, some with children.

The poor emaciated thing that he stumbles (quite literally) into has no little ducklings to follow her, and it's undoubtedly a good thing; she hardly looks as though she can feed herself. When she holds her hands out to him, eyes aglow with feverish hunger, he stops with little reluctance to fish his wallet from his pocket.

"I only have so much," he apologizes, and he only has that much because Molokov had insisted that he exchange some of his money, so that he could "do his business" so he said. The woman clutches the money to her chest like she might cry.

"Thank you," she whispers, and smiles up at him with her crooked, broken smile, and on a whim he extends his hand again.

She spends each night with him in the hotel, until he leaves, and in that time – a week, perhaps, at most – she grows luminous and youthful, and she hugs him like her very own brother when he has to go.

"Are you sure you'll be alright?" he asks, his vocal chords twisting. The guilt has yet to really set, but he's sure that it will the moment that she's no longer there, no longer playing with the lengthy curls of his untrimmed hair.

But she smiles and kisses the corner of his mouth, and tells him to go, that he's got so much waiting for him back home.

It kills him, how these women always seem to know.

It kills him, how they all forgive him so easily.

If they could do it, then why couldn't Arik? More importantly – why couldn't he? 

**Rachelle**

Paris is a lovely city.

(No, it's not.)

He's trying desperately to keep it in his pants, for once in his life, but it's difficult with Arik taunting him incessantly from his perch inside his head, always _taunting, _always passive-aggressively _pushing _and he knows, he knows before the first match is even over, that he's going to lose this battle.

(Think of Svetlana. Think of the kids –)

Thoughts of an Irish woman with a heart bigger than his are hard to dredge up when he is walking down a darkening street in a foreign city, which is still very much alive and promising, seducing him with all of the scents and lights and sounds and pretty painted lips.

He'd had such good intentions, but all it takes is a toss of silken hair and a brilliant, secret smile and he's reaching for his zipper.

Sex is such an easy thing, such a natural thing. It makes him forget – only for brief, explosive moments, but those are the moments he _lives _for. He doesn't want to be alive any other time, doesn't want to recall the way Natalia is beginning to look exactly like her mother.

This woman has a similar name – Nat-something, he'll never remember. He never does. He starts to feel guilty but never finishes.

She doesn't ask him for a condom and he finds himself relieved, because he'd gotten rid of his last box in the futile hope that he wouldn't dare to try anything without them.

She is beautiful and wild and leaves red stains on his neck and all the way down his chest, on the insides of his thighs. She loves him in a sense that he will never have with Svetlana; he loves her back in with a pathetic intensity, and together they manage to break the rickety bed in the hotel room she'd shown him to.

She tells him that it's okay, that it happens all the time. He smiles uneasily at the reminder that he, too, is not the only person in the world.

He hates being reminded.

He just wants everyone to be _quiet… _Especially the voices in his head.

_Shut up, Arik. Leave me alone._

Wouldn't it be so nice if the tables were turned? 

**Abigail**

The championship is fast approaching, and Anatoly is bitter.

His entire life is a sham. His career, his marriage, fatherhood. As hard as he's worked, as much as he's _tried, _there doesn't seem to be any secret to happiness – there doesn't seem to be anything to the concept of happiness at all, just old wives' tales and anecdotes. He has no way of applying something like that to his own life, which is dark and dull and utterly devoid of meaning.

He has no wife. He has no children. He has no brother, no parents, no one.

He's on the hunt the moment the plane sets down in London, eyes roving the crowds in bleak, cold anger. They snag on the sweaters and straps of every woman he passes, searching, hungry, desperate. There is no way to get rid of this feeling; he can only hope to drown it out.

Molokov catches him by the arm and drags him back to their hotel, and that's where he finds her.

She is a receptionist and her shift is nearly over; they blink at one another and his primal anger is, apparently, contagious because twenty minutes later she is in his room, and they are naked, and he is pressing into her without a thought in the world except _please take me away from here._

Sometimes he wonders what he offers these women that they couldn't find anywhere else.

He's not attractive, really, nor is he all that funny, or interesting, or emotionally open. He isn't husband material – obviously – nor do any of them seem to expect him to be.

Maybe women are the ones looking for one night stands.

This one breathes his name on the exhale of her orgasm, and looks so contented with her hair tangled in a sweaty, auburn mass around her head that he even begins to believe it.

He withdraws and pumps himself to completion, lips sealed, eyes squeezed tightly shut. There is a scream building in his chest that has nothing to do with their entanglement.

He doesn't emerge from his room until ten the next morning, and only then to attend the match. He beats his opponent in no less than ten moves.

In his mind, all that he can see is auburn locks swishing out the door. Bitter disappointment fills his mouth.

Perhaps, if he really doesn't love Svetlana, he should start looking elsewhere. 

**Henry**

No matter how much he learns, no matter what moves he makes, it always ends like this.

His youngest daughter is five years old and she is at home clamoring for his attention, through the phone and clumsily written letters lost in the mail and on national television, no doubt with Svetlana's expressed consent.

He is in a hotel room on the other side of the world, having loud, angry sex with the last woman he'll ever love.

He's not going back, and he can't go back.

Florence, though, she can't stay. Not with him. Secretly, he thinks that she is making the right choice; out loud, he is angry, almost violent.

_How could you do this to me?_

It's only what he deserves, after so long spent pining after some imaginary concept of love in his head, invading life after life, grinding his marriage into dust under the weight of his combined infidelities.

Right now, it's hard to look at it that way.

Florence tangles her fingers in his hair and _moans _like she never has before, even as wild as she already was when he met her – he thinks that at least that's one good thing he's done, one positive influence that he's been for someone. Florence has so much potential, and perhaps now she will be able to grow into it; she might never have left Freddie's side if not for him and his wayward penis.

(He wishes he could tell her this joke, the joke that is his life, but he doesn't think she would laugh.)

He doesn't think of Arik, who hasn't existed in so many years, and he doesn't think of any of the women whose faces he's forgotten if not the way their breasts had felt under his hands, their thighs wrapped around his neck and then his waist. He doesn't even think of Freddie Trumper, whose eyes he can't seem to forget, no matter how hard he tries.

At least when this is over, and when Florence becomes just another faceless woman in the sea of them in his mind, he will still remember sharp and blue and _fuck you._

_Fuck you, Anatoly, and every choice you've ever made._

He thinks he might actually be able to get along with him, now that Florence won't stand between them like their personal symbol of antagonism.

Antagonism, perversion; the only two things in his life of any permanence.

No, Florence can't stay.

Trumper, though. _He_ might even want to…


End file.
